Want to make a point? Tell a good story.
Following in the footsteps of Brian McLaren and others, Marcus Borg – popular scholar and author of Jesus Seminar fame – has written a novel. Putting Away Childish Things: A Tale of Modern Faith
(Harper, 2010) tells the story of professor Kate Riley, a liberal Christian in an academic setting. Her secularist constituents (including some of her colleagues) view her as too religious, while her conservative students (and their parents) view her liberal beliefs with suspicion.
I’m not sure how to best go about reviewing this book. I feel strange critiquing thoughts expressed by fictional characters. Even so, the book does convey a message, and since Borg chooses to elucidate certain ideas and not others, I believe I can honor the genre and still provide a fair review and critique.
The Book as a Novel
First, let’s consider the novel as a novel. Does the book succeed as a work of fiction? At one level, yes. Borg tells a good story. His narrative lets us peek into the politics that take place behind closed doors in the halls of academia. Issues of tenure, political posturing, leaving a legacy, one-upping your colleagues… they’re all here.
But at another level, the novel suffers from poor character development. Though Borg admits a didactic purpose for the novel, the book leans toward “preachiness” in too many places. The teaching is clear, but the story introduces us to one-dimensional characters with little depth or nuance. Perhaps it is unfair to critique Borg too strongly at this point, since this is his first attempt at fiction.
Thoughts on the Book’s Main Ideas
Now that we’ve dealt with the book’s aesthetics, we can turn to the main ideas. Here are some of my thoughts on the content of Putting Away Childish Things:
1. Preoccupied with sex
The inhabitants of Borg’s narrative world talk and think about sex, a lot. Traditional Christians are viewed as anti-homosexual, while (predictably) the progressive characters affirm homosexual behavior as legitimate for Christians. Ironically, though conservative Christians are portrayed as being obsessed with sex, it’s Borg who gives us the sexual history of two main characters in the first two chapters. It’s as if Borg can’t develop the main characters of his story without telling us about their past dalliances. It may seem that I am nitpicking here, but this point needs to be made: progressives like Borg seem to combine sexual expression and identity in a way that is historically unprecedented.
2. Separating truth from factuality.
Professor Kate Riley, the story’s hero, believes that truth and factuality are not always the same thing. Regarding the Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth, she says:
“People often get fixated on factuality: either things happened this way, or these stories aren’t true.” (25)
Instead, Riley believes that these stories can be true as parables:
“Parables are about meaning, not factuality. And the truth of a parable is its meaning. Parables can be truthful, truth-filled, even while not being historically factual. And I apply this to the birth stories: we best understand them when we see them as parables and overtures, and when we don’t worry or argue about whether they’re factual.” (26)
Riley claims that the identification of truth with factuality is a cultural product of the Enlightenment. (158) Instead, we should recognize the different ways in which truth is expressed. The result is a perceived “middle way” between hardcore liberalism and hardcore conservatism. Borg wants to affirm the truthfulness of the Bible’s testimony about Jesus while denying its historical validity.
Two things are missing from this discussion. First, it must be proven (not merely stated) that linking truth and factuality is a product of the Enlightenment. 1500 years of pre-Enlightenment Christian interpretation of the Bible surely stands against Borg’s suggestion.
Second, Borg never discusses the authorial intent of the Gospels. Kate Riley hints that Luke may have been putting together his birth narrative in a way to bring out themes which will later play a big part of the story. But the supreme question is: Did Luke intend to convey truth in parabolic form? Or was Luke intending to provide us with an historical account of these events? Surely Luke’s prologue should play a part in this discussion. But Borg never mentions it.
What replaces Christianity’s historical content? You guessed it: personal experience. One of the evangelical characters, a thoughtful young girl named Erin, is asked if Jesus really changed her. She replies:
“I know that it felt like Jesus was there, and I know that the experience changed me… That’s what I know.” (72)
When all is said and done, personal experience has the last word. Factuality isn’t what matters. In fact, believing in a literal resurrection of Jesus might very well be one of the “childish things” we should now put away. Freed from the chains of historicity, we can revel in our personal knowledge of the divine.
Despite the initial attraction of being freed from historicity, it’s Borg’s worldview that leads us to being chained. Erin is chained to her conversion experience as just an experience. What she has experienced is all she can know. When Christianity’s truthfulness is narrowed down to one’s experience, Christianity becomes much more narrow than Borg would like to admit.
3. Linking politics and religion
Kate Riley believes our current separation of politics and religion is unbiblical. She points out how the Gospel stories counter Roman imperial theology. On this point, Riley (and I assume Borg) is correct (although this reading can be overstated and over-applied).
But Borg fails to see that by divesting the Gospel stories of their factual content, he loses the very essence of what made Christianity subversive. The Roman Caesar was not threatened by first-century Marcus Borgs (who would best fit in the category of one of the ancient Gnosticisms). Caesar was threatened by a community who believed that the heart of Jesus actually began beating again on Easter morning. It’s the bodily resurrection of a crucified Messiah that has political consequences, not the politically innocuous emphasis on spiritual resurrection we find in Borg’s work.
4. Divisions within Christianity and Evangelicalism
Borg makes two points in this book that are spot on. First, he rightly acknowledges the wide gap between liberal and conservative Christianity. Here is a thought from one of the professors in the novel:
My God, Martin thought, “Let’s see what God has to say about that” – as if everything in the Bible came directly from God. Not for the first time, he thought that American Christianity was so deeply divided that it was virtually two different religions, both using the same Bible and the same words.” (81)
J. Gresham Machen couldn’t have said it better himself. We are indeed looking at two different religions here. That’s why the book that Borg co-authored with N.T. Wright (The Meaning of Jesus) is somewhat misleading. The alternative views of Jesus presented by Wright and Borg are not simply different interpretations within Christianity. It’s the difference between true Christianity and something else altogether.
Second, Borg points out the difficulty in defining “an evangelical.” One of the book’s subplots is about a liberal seminary which receives a generous endowment for a new professor who must be an evangelical. As the faculty discusses bringing on an evangelical scholar, they find themselves in a quandary as to how to apply the label:
“It seems to me that there isn’t a general sense of agreement about what makes an evangelical… Would it be enough if those under consideration identify themselves as evangelicals? Or does it mean that they have to meet certain standards, such as professing a belief in the inerrancy of Scripture, confessing Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation, having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, or counting the Bible as the ultimate basis for their beliefs rather than experience or tradition?” (149)
5. The myth of secular objectivity
One of the good points made by Borg’s story is the ideological intolerance of secularism. He points out the fallacy of thinking that one’s religious beliefs necessarily disqualify someone from being able to teach on religion. Kate Riley says:
“So – because I think there might be something to religion, I’m suspect? Would a music professor who thought music didn’t matter be a more objective professor? Would it be better if I thought of myself as the curator of a museum displaying the religious relics of antiquity? I’ve sometimes wondered if our colleagues are more like curators.” (173)
Borg also exposes the myth of tolerance:
“Tolerance seems to be prized only when its convenient, when those preaching tolerance are practicing something they think others should accept unconditionally.” (244)
Borg clearly disagrees with conservative Christians, and yet he believes they deserve a place at the table. He recognizes the ideological narrow-mindedness of secularism and the impossibility of secular objectivity.
6. Reductionism in Dealing with Traditional Christianity
For me, the most frustrating aspect of Borg’s book is the way he fails to deal with sophisticated arguments for the historical truthfulness of the Bible. Again and again, he reduces the conservative argument for inerrancy to the idea of “cafeteria Christianity”: If you do away with one part of the Bible, you will soon do away with all of it. Is this the only argument for Scriptural inspiration that Borg has come across in conservative circles? Surely not. But by setting up a straw man and then dangling the alternative viewpoint, he encourages Christians to set aside the Scriptures. Professor Riley asks a student:
“Suppose we knew that Paul was really, and strongly against homosexuality – that he was convinced that it’s sinful, and that it really mattered to him… Now, a question: Would it be okay to say Paul was wrong about that?”
Then, Riley provides a list of where the Apostle Paul was wrong (timing of Christ’s second coming, women staying silent in the churches, slavery). Her conclusion?
“So Christians have often decided that passages in the Bible are wrong – or, if you wish, that they no longer apply.” (209-210)
As I read through this section, I see a question begging to be asked: What is the standard for such judgments? It’s clear from Borg’s narrative that our own cultural mores and our personal experience become the basis of truth. Culture and experience are the authority. The Bible is sidelined.
Conclusion
In the end, Borg mangles the biblical gospel beyond recognition. Sin and grace are completely redefined.
As Erin (the evangelical student) wrestles with the concept of sin after having abandoned belief in a literal Adam and Eve, she comes to see original sin as “self-concern.” It isn’t inherited, but it happens to all of us. It’s a disease, a dis-ease, an anxiety that leads to self-preoccupation. How does Christianity help?
“The purpose of religion is to heal the dis-ease of existence. Isn’t that great? We get diagnosis and prescription in a single sentence.” (164)
Notice there is no sense in which we have sinned personally against God. At most, we have sinned against ourselves. Religion (take your pick) is there to pull us out of self-centeredness.
For Borg, the gospel is about centering more and more deeply in God. It’s not about believing things that are hard to believe. No need to bother with historical events and intellectual stumbling blocks like the cross and resurrection! Pay attention to your relationship with God and you’re good.
The main message of Putting Away Childish Things is that we should disregard the historical events at the heart of Christianity and replace them with personal experience. Sadly, in putting away these “childish things,” Borg and his followers do away with the childlike faith that Jesus commends. Borg once wrote a book called The Heart of Christianity. I believe his variation of Christianity would be better described as the shell of Christianity. The prayers and liturgy remain, but the gospel has vanished.
Rescuing Ambition
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